Brits buying property in Spain will pay double: 100% tax ‘designed to help Spanish buyers’

The Spanish Socialist Party PSOE proposed in the parliament a new law that would require all foreigners to pay 100% of their purchase price if they bought a property. 

The British who purchase a house in Spain will be required to pay the exact same amount of taxes as they paid for the home. 

Spanish socialists have made this proposal in order to help Spaniards access rental housing, despite the national housing shortage. 

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The new regulation is intended to create a complementary tax to the Property Transfer Tax, which will only be applicable to citizens who reside outside of the EU. 

The experts of the Council of Economists have given an example to show the magnitude of this proposal.

If a Brit wants to buy a house valued at €500,000, it would mean that they have to pay €1,000,000, including the tax. 

The president of the Spanish Registry of Economists and Tax Advisors (REAF) Augustin Fernandez, has called this proposal ‘madness’.

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Fernandez said that courts would ultimately decide whether the tax was legal.

He has also said that this proposal will ‘penalise’ investment by non-EU foreigners. 

The PSOE initiative may be more symbolic than anything else, as the percentage of non-EU buyers is just 3% and their average price per square metre is already the highest.